Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment has he made of the capacity of the further education sector to meet the needs of the young people with more complex special education needs and disability who will be entering further education over the next five years.

It is essential that all learners in the further education (FE) sector, including those with complex special needs, experience the highest quality teaching. We recognise that teacher recruitment and retention can be challenging for providers which is why, in the current financial year, the government is investing £50 million in programmes designed to improve the supply and quality of FE teachers. In January 2022 we launched a recruitment campaign to raise awareness of the opportunities to teach in FE with a wider audience. For those choosing to specialise in special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) teaching in the FE sector, we have also announced that we will offer training bursaries worth £15,000 each, tax-free, for a further academic year (2022/23). This will help to boost the supply of teachers with specialist training to support learners with SEND in the FE sector.

We are also investing £2.6 billion between 2022 and 2025 to deliver new places and improve existing provision for children and young people with SEND or who require alternative provision. This funding represents a transformational investment in new high needs provision and will help deliver tens of thousands of new high needs places, including in post-16 and FE settings.

Local authorities are best placed to understand the capacity of their local FE provision to accommodate additional children and young people with SEND. The department does not currently collect data centrally on available capacity in high needs provision but is continuing to work with local authorities to better understand future demand for SEND provision, including in FE settings, as it considers how it can best support the sector going forwards.